When CPUs were a lot slower you could genuinely get noticeable performance improvements by compiling packages yourself, but nowadays the overhead from running pre-compiled binaries is negligible.
Yes, I tried it around 2002/2003, back when the recommended way was from stage1. I think I had a P4 with HT. It was noticeably faster than redhat or mandrake (yes, I was distro hopping a lot). Emerge gnome-mono was a night run. Openoffice about 24hrs.
Lots of wasted time but I did learn how to setup some things manually.
When CPUs were a lot slower you could genuinely get noticeable performance improvements by compiling packages yourself, but nowadays the overhead from running pre-compiled binaries is negligible.
Hell, even Gentoo optionally offers binary packages now.
Yes, I tried it around 2002/2003, back when the recommended way was from stage1. I think I had a P4 with HT. It was noticeably faster than redhat or mandrake (yes, I was distro hopping a lot). Emerge gnome-mono was a night run. Openoffice about 24hrs.
Lots of wasted time but I did learn how to setup some things manually.
Most of the reason to build your own packages is a form of runtime assurance - to know what your computer is running is 100% what you intend.
At least as a guix user that’s what I tell myself.